Fabian M. Suchanek

Full professor
Télécom Paris, Institut Polytechnique de Paris
“Data, Intelligence, and Graphs” (DIG) team, Office 4C20
19 place Marguerite Perey, 91120 Palaiseau, France
https://suchanek.name
GIVENNAME@suchanek.name
Public key rsa4096/CAA83288

Research Interests

Knowledge Bases, Information Extraction, Semantic Web, Automated Reasoning, Knowledge Mining

Professional Experience

2016 Full professor at Télécom Paris University, Paris, France
2013 Associate professor at Télécom Paris University, Paris, France
2012 Leader of the Otto Hahn Group “Ontologies” at the Max Planck Institute for Informatics, Saarbrücken, Germany
2010 Postdoctoral Researcher (reporting to Dr. Serge Abiteboul) at INRIA Saclay, Paris region, France
2009 Visiting Researcher (reporting to Dr. Rakesh Agrawal) at Microsoft Research, Search Labs in Mountain View, CA, USA

Education

2014 French Habilitation (HDR), University Paris 6, Paris, France
2014 German Habilitation (Venia Legendi), Saarland University, Saarbrücken, Germany
2008 PhD in Computer Science (supervised by Prof. Dr. Gerhard Weikum), Max-Planck Institute for Informatics, Saarbrücken, Germany
2005 Master of Science in Computer Science, Saarland University, Saarbrücken, Germany
2003 Bachelor of Science in Cognitive Science, University of Osnabrück, Germany

Awards, Scholarships, Grants

2019 ANR grant “NoRDF” on Artificial Intelligence with 4 industrial partners (1.3m €)
2018 “10 year Test of Time Award” of The Web Conference (WWW 2018), for our work on YAGO
2018 Best research paper nominee of the International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC 2018), awarded to the top 3 of 38 papers
2017 “Prominent Paper Award” of the Artificial Intelligence Journal
2016 French national ANR Grant for 1 PhD student and 1 postdoc
2015 Outstanding Reviewer Award of the International Conference on Web Search and Data Mining (WSDM 2014), for the top 12% of 220 reviewers
2014 DigiCosme Grant from Paris-Saclay University, for 1 PhD student and 1 PostDoc
2014 Best Reviewer Award of the PIKM 2014 workshop, out of 23 reviewers
2013 Top 3 course in terms of teaching quality in Computer Science at Saarland University, out of 42 courses
2013 Best student paper award at the World Wide Web conference (WWW 2013), out of 125 accepted papers
2012 Best paper runner up of the Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP 2012), awarded to the top 3 out of 99 accepted papers
2011 Best demo award at the World Wide Web conference (WWW 2011), out of 25 accepted demos
2010 Otto Hahn Assistant Professorship, awarded to 4 scientists per year across all scientific disciplines at the Max Planck Society, with an annual budget of 30k EUR and 2 PhD positions for 3-5 years
2010 Honorable Mention of the SIGMOD Dissertation Award, awarded to 2 database researchers per year worldwide
2010 Otto Hahn Medal, awarded to 30 PhD graduates each year in the Max Planck Society
2005 Scholarship of the German Research Foundation (DFG) for the PhD
2005 Günter Hotz Award, awarded to 3 out of ca. 250 Computer Science graduates at Saarland University each year

Student and postdoc supervision

Current
Former
I have also been a reviewer for the following doctoral theses: Ndapandula Nakashole (2012, Saarland University), Bilyana Taneva (2013, University of Saarbrücken), Simon Razniewski (2014, University of Bolzano), Benjamin Roth (2014, Saarland University), Ioana Ileana (2014, Télécom Paris University), Davide Mottin (2015, University of Trento), Arnab Dutta (2015, University of Mannheim), Julien Corman (2015, Toulouse University), Erdal Kuzey (2017, Saarland University), Dimitra Papadimitriou (2017, University of Trento), Abdelfettah Feliachi (2017, Université Paris-Est), Amit Gupta (2017, École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne), Paul Lagrée (2017, Université Paris-Sud), Vasilis Efthymiou (2017, University of Crete), Toni Grütze (2018, University of Potsdam), Benjamin Spencer (2018, University of Oxford), Matteo Lissandrini (2018, University of Trento), Subhi Issa (2019, CNAM), Emir Muñoz (2020, University of Galway), Shikhar Vashishth (2020, IIT Bangalore).

I have also been a habilitation reviewer for Konstantin Todorov (2020, University of Montpellier).

Scientific profile

My main scientific project is the YAGO knowledge base. The original paper from 2007 has attracted more than 3000 citations so far. The knowledge base is used in numerous projects around the world, among others DBpedia and the IBM Watson Project. YAGO has given rise to the YAGO-NAGA project at the Max Planck Institute, where around a dozen researchers now work on key questions of semantic information processing. The knowledge base is continuously being developed, with half a dozen follow-up publications.

Since then, I have moved beyond the construction of knowledge bases, and advanced into the application, the mining, and the maintenance of knowledge. Therefore, a large part of my citations come from publications in very diverse areas: information extraction, Web services, watermarking of knowledge bases, information retrieval, knowledge mining, ontology matching, social tagging, inductive logic programming, efficient querying, and computational creativity.

All my publications are available on my homepage.

Industrial Research Experience at Microsoft

I was working in the Microsoft Research Search Labs team on the shopping portal of the Bing search engine. Together with Rakesh Agrawal and John Shafer, I submitted a patent on commerce search user interfaces (United States Patent Application 20110307504).

Teaching

I teach courses on Information Extraction, Natural Language Processing, Web technologies, and the Semantic Web.
2014 - Standard teaching duty at Télécom Paris, France, with 150-200 hours per year
2017 One week at Bucharest Polytechnical University, Romania
2016 One course at the RUSSIR Summer school in Saratov, Russia
2013 One course at the University of Saarbrücken, Germany
2011 One course at 3 universities in Senegal

Service Activities

2019Jury for a professor position at École Polytechnique, France
2018 Treasurer of the The Web Conference 2019 (WWW 2019)
2017 Co-organizer of the New Researcher Symposium at SIGMOD 2017
2017 Referee for the ERC Consolidator Grants
2016Jury for a professor position at Université de Caen, France
2016 Co-organizer of the New Researcher Symposium at SIGMOD 2016
2015 Demo chair of BDA (French national database conference)
2015 External expert for the Czech Science Foundation
2015 External expert for the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research
2015 PC co-chair of the Web DB Workshop at SIGMOD 2015
2014 PC co-chair of the Knowledge Extraction workshop at NIPS 2014
2013 PC co-chair of the Knowledge Extraction workshop at CIKM 2013
2013 PC co-chair of the PhD Workshop at CIKM 2013
2013 Guest editor of a special issue of the Elsevier Journal of Web Semantics
2012 PC co-chair of the Knowledge Extraction workshop at NAACL 2012
2012 PC co-chair of the PhD Workshop at CIKM 2012
2011 PC co-chair of the PhD Workshopat CIKM 2011
I have been reviewing for the following journals and conferences: COLING 2020, AKBC 2020, WWW 2020, SIGMOD 2019, WWW 2019, CIKM 2018, SIGMOD 2018, IJCAI 2018, WWW 2018, EMNLP 2017, ISWC 2017, EMNLP 2016, CIKM 2016, IJCAI 2016, EDBT 2016, ESWC 2016, ICDE 2016, VLDB journal 2016, WWW 2016, WSDM 2016, Communications of the ACM 2016, ACM Transactions on Intelligent Systems and Technology 2015, Journal of Web Semantics 2015, CIKM 2015, ESWC 2015, WSDM 2015, ACL 2014, WSDM 2014, WWW 2013, ESWC 2013, NAACL 2013, Semantic Web Journal 2013, EDBT 2013, ICDE 2013, WSDM 2013, TODS 2013, VLDB 2013, EMNLP 2012, ESWC 2012, ACL 2012, EDBT/ICDT 2012, WSDM 2012, Communications of the ACM 2012, WWW 2012, TKDE 2012, EDBT 2011, TKDE 2011, TODS 2011, Artifical Intelligence journal 2011, BDA 2011, WWW 2011, AAAI 2010, WEBIST 2010, Journal of Web Semantics 2010, Transactions on Intelligent Systems and Technology 2010, WSDM 2010, ICDE 2010, EACL 2009, ESWC 2008, TKDE 2007, SIGKDD 2006 — plus workshops.

Tutorials and Invited Talks

I have given 8 tutorials at international conferences (WWW 2015, VLDB 2014, SIGMOD 2013, ICDE 2013, EDBT 2011, IJCAI 2011, CIKM 2010, DASFAA 2009), mostly about knowledge bases, information extraction, and the Semantic Web. In addition, I have given the following invited talks (seminar = I was the only speaker; invited = there were other invited speakers; keynote = there were non-invited speakers).
2020University of Galway/Ireland(seminar)
2020University College Dublin/Ireland(seminar)
2019Wikimedia Showcase Talk(invited)
2019EDOC Conference, Paris/France(keynote)
2019 50th anniversary of Computer Science in Saarbrücken/Germany (invited)
2019 IBM Almaden, US (seminar)
2019 University of California at Santa Cruz, US (seminar)
2019 INRIA Saclay, for the French minister of defense (invited)
2018 Oxford University, UK (seminar)
2018 Hasso Plattner Institute, Germany (seminar)
2018 École des Ponts et Chaussées, France (invited)
2017 EPFL, Switzerland (seminar)
2017 Wikidata Conference, Germany (keynote)
2017 Bucharest Polytechnical University, Romania (seminar)
2017 Kazan University, Russia (seminar)
2017 Chelyabinsk University, Russia (seminar)
2017 WSDM Cup Workshop (keynote)
2016 Toronto University, Canada (seminar)
2016 Waterloo University, Canada (seminar)
2016 IBM Zürich, Switzerland(seminar)
2016 Leopoldina Journalist College, Germany (invited)
2016 IBM Almaden, California, USA(seminar)
2016 Facebook, California, USA(seminar)
2016 Apple, California, USA(seminar)
2016 IBM Zürich, Switzerland(seminar)
2016 Max Planck Institute for Informatics, Germany(seminar)
2016 Google Zürich, Switzerland(seminar)
2016 Aalborg University, Denmark(seminar)
2016Wiki Workshop(invited)
2016 French Workshop on Quality of Linked Data(keynote)
2016 Paris 5 University, France (seminar)
2016 SNIPS Seminar on Context-Sensitive Search (invited)
2015 Workshop on Information and Communication Systems(invited)
2015 25th anniversary of the Max Planck Institute, Germany (invited)
2014 KET workshop(keynote)
2015 Central Bank of Brazil(seminar)
2015 University of Bolzano, Italy (seminar)
2014 EGC Conference(keynote)
2014 New York Knowledge Engineering Meetup (invited)
2014 APWeb Conference (invited)
2014 AHA Workshop (invited)
2014 University of Trento, Italy (seminar)
2014 University of Bolzano, Italy (seminar)
2014 East China Normal University, Shanghai, China (seminar)
2014 Stanford, California, USA (invited)
2014 INRA, Paris, France (seminar)
2013 Yahoo Inc., California, USA (seminar)
2013 Google Inc., California, USA(seminar)
2013 Microsoft Research Silicon Valley, California, USA (seminar)
2013 Singapore Management University, Singapore(seminar)
2012 Webdam-Modas Workshop(invited)
2012 WOLE Workshop at ISWC 2012 (keynote)
2011 Gaston Berger University, Senegal(seminar)
2011 Microsoft Research Cambridge, UK(seminar)
2011 University of Grenoble, France(seminar)
2010 SeCo workshop (invited)
2010 University of Bolzano, Italy(seminar)
2010 University of Amsterdam, Netherlands(seminar)
2010 INRIA Saclay, France (successful application talk)
2010 Microsoft Research Cambridge, UK (successful application talk)
2010 University of Oxford, UK (successful application talk)
2009 Politecnico di Milano, Italy (successful application talk)
2008 Microsoft Research Silicon Valley, California, USA (successful application talk)
2008 University of Karlsruhe, Germany (successful application talk)
2008 University of Washington, USA (unsuccessful application talk)
2008 L3S Research Center, Hannover, Germany (seminar)
2008 University of Osnabrück, Germany (seminar)
2008 DFKI, Kaiserslautern, Germany (seminar)

Organizational Activities

2019- Responsible for the education field of Computer Science of the Institut Polytechnique de Paris
2017 - Co-responsible for the Continuing Education program in Data Science at Telecom Paris
2017 - 2018 Responsible for the education field of Computer Science at Paris-Saclay University
2014 - 2016 Co-/Vice-responsible for the education field of Computer Science at Paris-Saclay University
2014 - 2018 Co-responsible for the semester harmonisation at Paris-Saclay University
2013 - 2020 Responsible of the “Data & Knowledge” study track at Paris-Saclay University and its successor “DataAI” at Institut Polytechnique de Paris
2012 - 2013 Representative of the Scientific Staff of the Max Planck Institute for Informatics
2007 - 2008 Member of the Examination Commission for Computer Science at Saarland University
2007 - 2008 Students’ speaker of the Research Training Group (Graduiertenkolleg)
2003 - 2008 Student representative in 8 commissions for hiring professors at Saarland University
2003 - 2008 Member of the Students’ Union for Computer Science at Saarland University
2001 - 2003 Founding member of the Students’ Union for Cognitive Science at the University of Osnabrück

Languages (formal)

Java expert
C# & ASP.NET expert (some time ago)
C++, PASCAL, LISPexpert (a long time ago)
BASIC, Assembler expert (a really long time ago)

Languages (natural)

German fluent (mother tongue)
English fluent (1 year in the US)
French fluent (teaching in French at Télécom Paris)
Italian good knowledge (8 semesters of study, Unicert 2)
Romanian reasonable knowledge (studying at A2 level)
Spanish rudimentary knowledge (8 semesters of study, Unicert 2, but long ago)
Latin knowledge at homeopathic level (3 years at school, Latinum, very long ago)

Extracurricular Activities

2013 - 2019 Teaching a 6 year dancing course at Télécom Paris, France
2016Teaching a 7 week ballroom dancing class at the American University of Paris
2013 Teaching a 14 week dancing course at the sports center of Saarland University
2010 - 2011 Teaching a 52 week dancing course at Télécom Paris, France
2008 Teaching an 18 week dancing course at the Max-Planck Institute for Informatics
2007 Teaching a 10 week dancing course at the Max-Planck Institute for Informatics

Personal

I am interested in Religion (see my Atheist Bible), University politics (see my blog Fluctuat et Mergitur), natural languages, Ballroom dancing, Geeky stuff (see my SVG slide editor PowerLine or my Spreadsheets that run in a browser), Traveling, Global Poverty, and Internet Security.